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Today, Time magazine got hold of a memo written by then-CIA head Leon Panetta after he received orders from Barack Obama’s team to greenlight the bin Laden mission. Here’s the text, which summarized the situation:

Received phone call from Tom Donilon who stated that the President made a decision with regard to AC1 [Abbottabad Compound 1]. The decision is to proceed with the assault.

The timing, operational decision making and control are in Admiral McRaven’s hands. The approval is provided on the risk profile presented to the President. Any additional risks are to be brought back to the President for his consideration. The direction is to go in and get bin Laden and if he is not there, to get out. Those instructions were conveyed to Admiral McRaven at approximately 10:45 am.

Only the memo doesn’t show a gutsy call. It doesn’t show a president willing to take the blame for a mission gone wrong. It shows a CYA maneuver by the White House.

The memo puts all control in the hands of Admiral McRaven – the “timing, operational decision making and control” are all up to McRaven. So the notion that Obama and his team were walking through every stage of the operation is incorrect. The hero here was McRaven, not Obama. And had the mission gone wrong, McRaven surely would have been thrown under the bus.

The memo is crystal clear on that point. It says that the decision has been made based solely on the “risk profile presented to the President.” If any other risks – no matter how minute – arose, they were “to be brought back to the President for his consideration.” This is ludicrous. It is wiggle room. It was Obama’s way of carving out space for himself in case the mission went bad. If it did, he’d say that there were additional risks of which he hadn’t been informed; he’d been kept in the dark by his military leaders.

Finally, the memo is unclear on just what the mission is. Was it to capture Bin Laden or to kill him? The White House itself was unable to decide what the mission was in the hours after the Bin Laden kill, and actually switched its language. The memo shows why: McRaven was instructed to “get” Bin Laden, whatever that meant.

Even if it was Obama's (or had it been Bush's) call, the only risk either would face is a political one. Hardly gutsy, IMO. The term gutsy can only be applied to the men/women that were involved in carrying out the mission. They had everything on the line. Back in Washington it would have gone something like this:

"You know the guy who was behind the attacks of 9/11 that we have been trying to get for years? He's in a house and we can kill him. Should we do it?"

"Um, ok."

"The efforts of the government alone will never be enough. In the end the people must choose and the people must help themselves" ~ JFK; from his famous inauguration speech (What Democrats sounded like before today's neo-Liberals hijacked that party)

Even if it was Obama's (or had it been Bush's) call, the only risk either would face is a political one. Hardly gutsy, IMO. The term gutsy can only be applied to the men/women that were involved in carrying out the mission. They had everything on the line. Back in Washington it would have gone something like this:

"You know the guy who was behind the attacks of 9/11 that we have been trying to get for years? He's in a house and we can kill him. Should we do it?"

"Um, ok."

This was actually a tougher decision than that. Imagine if the raid had failed, and the SEAL team was stranded in Pakistan. If the Pakistanis held them, then it would be a massive blow to the thin veneer of an alliance that we've struggled to maintain, not to mention devastating for the SEALs. If, OTOH, they released them, then the Pakistani people might have overthrown the government and replaced it with a more overtly Islamist one. The worst case would have been the raid failing and the SEALs falling into the hands of the Islamists, with the government trying to extract them somehow. Think Blackhawk Down meets Iran circa 1979, and you get an idea of the potential downside.

Give credit where it is due. It was a tough call to make, but from everything that I've read, it was done in spite of Obama, thanks to Valerie Jarrett's keeping him from committing to the raid, and Hillary, Panetta and Gates working to set it up so that when the go order came, they could execute before he could change his mind.

This was actually a tougher decision than that. Imagine if the raid had failed, and the SEAL team was stranded in Pakistan. If the Pakistanis held them, then it would be a massive blow to the thin veneer of an alliance that we've struggled to maintain, not to mention devastating for the SEALs. If, OTOH, they released them, then the Pakistani people might have overthrown the government and replaced it with a more overtly Islamist one. The worst case would have been the raid failing and the SEALs falling into the hands of the Islamists, with the government trying to extract them somehow. Think Blackhawk Down meets Iran circa 1979, and you get an idea of the potential downside.

Give credit where it is due. It was a tough call to make, but from everything that I've read, it was done in spite of Obama, thanks to Valerie Jarrett's keeping him from committing to the raid, and Hillary, Panetta and Gates working to set it up so that when the go order came, they could execute before he could change his mind.

I understand all that, Ody. My point is simply that the calculations of Obama & Co. were political in as much as they were either pro or con to Obama's future prospects far more than any of the valid considerations you point out. Unless, of course, that particular decision diverged from every other decision the man has made in his life.

If it was the latter, then I give him credit. However, my money would be on the former.

"The efforts of the government alone will never be enough. In the end the people must choose and the people must help themselves" ~ JFK; from his famous inauguration speech (What Democrats sounded like before today's neo-Liberals hijacked that party)

True. So what you do is give the school staff the power to stop whatever happens. If it's verbal teasing, you give them the power to tell the kids to stop it. If it's rock throwing, you give them the...